Real-time multiplayer design was originally seen as undesirable by designers
Yuhki Yamashita · How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO) · Dec 5, 2024 · at 4:29
Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, discusses the initial industry skepticism surrounding Figma's core collaborative features.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The tension was this idea that everyone could be in the file at the same time. And that was now intuitive, but back then was considered undesirable to some extent. Like, you know, this idea that a hovering art director is always going to be in your file, like your product manager, your CEO is going to be able to see every movement you're making was not something that was necessarily welcomed.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Yuhki Yamashita
Yamashita: The best products come from internal conflict challenging core team intuition
“I think the best products come out of a little bit of, like, internal conflict around people standing up for a use case in a way that, like, is counterintuitive to the core product team. The core product team is so used to one way of thinking and, like, a set …”
Dylan Field mapped Design Twitter to seed Figma with top influencers
“And so he actually visualized Design Twitter into this graph And figured out the nodes that were the largest of, okay, who's following who, and then went to them and showed Figma, got their feedback, kept going back to them, not trying to sell them it, but jus…”
Operational changes at early Uber often had bigger impact than the app
“Uber was very much about, you can be a little bit more fast and loose, get stuff out there, learn. And to your point, ops was really important to the point where sometimes operational changes could have a drastically bigger impact on the business, on the user,…”
Two-thirds of Figma's weekly active users are non-designers
“Two thirds of our users are, our weekly active users are non-designers, like developers, like PMs and others.”
The biggest design problem is the gap between mockups and production code
“I think the biggest problem is that kind of, like, kind of gap between what's, you know, what's designed in their mock and what's actually built.”
Startups must sell product trajectory over feature parity when fighting incumbents
“When you end up in a conversation where it's just about features, this is not a place you want to be in, right? Because, well, technically, Sketch has more features, you know, or competitors have more features. And so, what we really needed to kind of, like, s…”